Mental Health and Learning Disabilities: Heritage and Stigma will bring together a number of projects on the history of mental health care. The University of Huddersfield will work with local charities (St Anne's and Mencap) and the South West Yorkshire Partnership, a regional NHS Foundation Trust, to actively engage a range of stakeholders in the development, delivery and dissemination of the project. At the centre of this project will be current service users who will contribute to both the design of individual projects and their successful delivery. The partners will work together so that they will ensure the long term legacy of their projects. This will include exhibitions in the short term but also the development and delivery of teaching and learning materials. Both will exploit resources held by the West Yorkshire Archive Service. These resources will be developed with a wide ranging audience in mind. They will be used, not only to understand the longer term story of mental health care but also address the stigma associated with mental ill health and learning disabilities in the past and in the present.

The aim of this seminar series is to develop ideas on how to encourage and develop co-production in mental health. Co-production involves mental health service users being able to make decisions about their own treatment and care as equal partners alongside professionals. This application is timely because there is currently a strong policy emphasis encouraging the greater involvement of service users and carers in making decisions about the care they receive. It is widely recognised that new ways of working with service users (a new approach to professionalism) are needed in mental health care. This seminar series was developed jointly by a research team which includes service users, carers, and people working in charitable/voluntary organisations, and in public and governmental organisations. Academics in the research team are from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: mental health nursing, philosophy, political science, psychiatry, social work and sociology. The seminar series will bring people together from different stakeholder groups in order to develop ideas about new ways of working in mental health which are based on the principle of co-production. This will involve considering current practices, policies, approaches in different organisations, as well as education and training in mental health. Crucially, mental health service users and their family carers will fully participate in this process. We use the term 'professional' in a new way. A professional can (for us) belong to any occupational group. What makes someone professional is, in our view, their sense of commitment - not their occupational status. Importantly, we believe that service users and family carers should be considered professionals in this context because they are 'experts in experience'. Our speakers and participants include some people who are in positions where they can shape practice, education and policy. We believe though that it is important that all the participants have equal status. The idea is that sharing ideas across groups will be enable us to work out how professionalism in mental health can be based on co-production. In healthcare a growing importance is being placed on respecting different people's values. This is known as Values Based Practice (VBP). But the problem is that VBP overlooks problems of power - that is the reality that some people's values and perspectives are more powerful and influential than other people's. This is why this seminar series will encourage people to think about co-production by considering some of the key ideas associated with 'democratic professionalism' (DP). DP is based on the idea that it is important that the voices of 'lay' people, particularly marginalised people, should be regarded as highly relevant when it comes to shaping professional practice and values. Another principle of DP is that professionals should be assessed according to the extent to which they support the involvement and enablement of people they work with, such as service users. In other words, professionalism should involve sharing power with others, not exercising power over them. We believe that our seminar series will contribute to the development of professional practice and values which are suited to the 21st century. Each seminar will focus on a particular topic: the first two seminars set the scene with a focus on co-production and democratic professionalism and on people's lived experience of co-production. The seminars which follow consider how changes to practice, policy and education in mental health could be implemented to develop a new form of professionalism based on co-production. We will make the video-recordings of the seminar series available on our website and we will have a blog to continue the discussions and conversations which take place in the seminars. All the groups represented at the seminars will contribute to future practical and research initiatives.

The aim of this seminar series is to develop ideas on how to encourage and develop co-production in mental health. Co-production involves mental health service users being able to make decisions about their own treatment and care as equal partners alongside professionals. This application is timely because there is currently a strong policy emphasis encouraging the greater involvement of service users and carers in making decisions about the care they receive. It is widely recognised that new ways of working with service users (a new approach to professionalism) are needed in mental health care. This seminar series was developed jointly by a research team which includes service users, carers, and people working in charitable/voluntary organisations, and in public and governmental organisations. Academics in the research team are from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: mental health nursing, philosophy, political science, psychiatry, social work and sociology. The seminar series will bring people together from different stakeholder groups in order to develop ideas about new ways of working in mental health which are based on the principle of co-production. This will involve considering current practices, policies, approaches in different organisations, as well as education and training in mental health. Crucially, mental health service users and their family carers will fully participate in this process. We use the term 'professional' in a new way. A professional can (for us) belong to any occupational group. What makes someone professional is, in our view, their sense of commitment - not their occupational status. Importantly, we believe that service users and family carers should be considered professionals in this context because they are 'experts in experience'. Our speakers and participants include some people who are in positions where they can shape practice, education and policy. We believe though that it is important that all the participants have equal status. The idea is that sharing ideas across groups will be enable us to work out how professionalism in mental health can be based on co-production. In healthcare a growing importance is being placed on respecting different people's values. This is known as Values Based Practice (VBP). But the problem is that VBP overlooks problems of power - that is the reality that some people's values and perspectives are more powerful and influential than other people's. This is why this seminar series will encourage people to think about co-production by considering some of the key ideas associated with 'democratic professionalism' (DP). DP is based on the idea that it is important that the voices of 'lay' people, particularly marginalised people, should be regarded as highly relevant when it comes to shaping professional practice and values. Another principle of DP is that professionals should be assessed according to the extent to which they support the involvement and enablement of people they work with, such as service users. In other words, professionalism should involve sharing power with others, not exercising power over them. We believe that our seminar series will contribute to the development of professional practice and values which are suited to the 21st century. Each seminar will focus on a particular topic: the first two seminars set the scene with a focus on co-production and democratic professionalism and on people's lived experience of co-production. The seminars which follow consider how changes to practice, policy and education in mental health could be implemented to develop a new form of professionalism based on co-production. We will make the video-recordings of the seminar series available on our website and we will have a blog to continue the discussions and conversations which take place in the seminars. All the groups represented at the seminars will contribute to future practical and research initiatives.

In a context where health systems are under increasing strain and the social drivers of health disparities are increasingly being recognised, there is a growing acknowledgement of the value of non-medical responses such as creative, physical and nature-based activities in supporting health and wellbeing. Evidence reveals that one third of GP appointments are for issues that are not medical and many tangible health problems arise as a result of social drivers (for example, loneliness, anxieties around finances or housing, depression about body image or being unemployed). The potential for developing the wider use of creative and community-based approaches to address health disparities is therefore substantial. West Yorkshire is leading the way in developing the use of non-medical interventions to promote health and well-being. For example, the award-winning charity Creative Minds has developed an innovative approach to providing creative and outdoor activities through a network of over 120 community providers; and West Yorkshire is one of the National Centre for Creative Health pilots. However, creative and community providers rely on short term funding and are not fully integrated into the health care system with the result that provision can be ad hoc and unsustainable. This project will build on leading edge developments across West Yorkshire in progressing the creative health agenda by bringing together key stakeholders (health trusts, local authorities, creative/cultural practitioners, community providers and people with lived experience) to innovate thinking in order to better integrate creative and community-based responses into health improvement strategies and systems to address health disparities. The project will encompass a truly coproductive approach centred around the use of collaborative action inquiry as a participatory process of learning for change in four iterative phases. It will build on stories from people with lived experience to provide a deeper understanding of the social drivers and complexities of health problems in communities, as well as learning from the challenges and achievements of partners in practice. These will be complemented by a rapid review of evidence about different collaborative models for community health provision which together will inform coproduction of an initial programme theory in a cross-ICS collaborative action inquiry workshop. The initial programme theory will be used to focus community mapping of creative provision and partnerships and further coproduction in consultation workshops with community groups and people with lived experience in phase 2. This will be followed by a further cycle of collaborative action inquiry with key stakeholders to refine the programme theory about how to integrate community assets into responses to health disparities and work up into a logic model, principles and guidance. These will then be tested in 5 action research case studies which will involve setting up community asset hubs, one in each of the ICS local authority areas to further refine the cross-ICS consortium model for integrating community assets. The final phase will involve a third stakeholder action inquiry workshop to respond to learning from the action research case studies and further refine and finalise the programme theory for the consortium and develop plans for scaling up, embedding and sustaining the integration of community assets into health improvement systems research. The new University of Huddersfield Health Innovation Campus and Wellbeing Academy will provide a context for hosting these developments and undertaking the research and development functions needed to support, sustain and further develop health improvement initiatives. We have support from all the key health and local authority players along with creative community providers and people with lived experience and wider community representatives who will be actively involved throughout the project.